A Country Year

by Hubbell, Liddy; Hubbell, Sue;

  He likes being called Andy Beagle. He wags his tail when I say to him, “Andy Beagle, Andy Beagle, Andy Beagle is his name and he’s a good dog.”

  In truth, although I do not mention it to him, he is probably part foxhound. The first summer that Paul and I lived here we found him in the road one day in the company of a sister, the pair of them about the size of rats, and a mother, a full-blooded beagle who was thin and desperate. The three of them were starving and nearly hairless from bad cases of mange. I do not think they had been dumped out, because people here are serious about hounds. Perhaps the mother had been lost one night when her owner had taken her out to run with other hounds, and her pups had been born since then. She looked as though she had been on her own for a long time. When we asked around no one knew of her or her pups. We already had two other dogs, a pair of Irish setters, but we brought home the hound and houndlings and fed them. The female pup was too far gone and she died the first night. But the male, weak as he was, looked up from his first dish of food, eyes shining, and gave me a little toss of his head, a gesture that I came to learn is a beagle high sign, and I knew he would live. The mother, too, regained her health and strength, and with the application of the same mange medicine with which I was treating her son, her coat also grew back. She was grateful for the food, but she was old, wary and had seen a good deal of life. After she ate, she would retreat under the pickup and never presume to become a part of the affairs of this place. A man I knew who bred beagles came over one day and said that she was a good one and he would like her for breeding, so I let him take her.

  The male pup, however, had settled in self-assuredly, and won me over by being the only dog I have ever known who knows how to hug. He thrusts the top of his head against my neck under my chin and presses hard against me. I do not know whether other beagles do this, but Andy has done it all his life. I have always named pets after writers, so we named him Andy, after E. B. White. He grew leggier than is usual for a beagle, and his black, white and liver markings and build suggest that his father was a foxhound.

  Over the years, with no encouragement from any human, Andy has turned himself into a hunter. Nose to the ground, he follows a trail, baying as long as the scent is present, silent when it is not. He is dedicated and passionate, and very occasionally he catches a rabbit. But not often. Sometimes I wonder whether the old and experienced rabbits about the place take him out for a run in the mornings just for exercise.

  The one who more often catches a rabbit is Tazzie, the new dog about the place, whom I acquired some years after the setters died of old age. My niece had taken in Tazzie’s mother, a Belgian shepherd, from a man who was moving and wanted to be rid of her. He claimed that she was spayed, but it turned out that she was pregnant and gave birth to seven pups of undetermined fatherhood. My brother Bil who writes things had just returned from Tasmania, where he had been doing a magazine story on Tasmanian devils, and when he saw the litter he singled out my dog and insisted that she had the markings of a Tasmanian devil. The name Tazzie was born. When I took her I said I would keep the name, even though it was not a writer’s, on the understanding that it was short for Tasmania, which has a regal sound she may earn in her mature years, but not devil; for there was no hint of deviltry about Tazzie and she showed every sign, even as a pup, of having all a shepherd’s qualities: loyalty, lovingness and obedience.

  Even while she was just a black fuzz-ball puppy, Tazzie tried to follow Andy everywhere, but the shepherd in her made her a sight, not a scent, hunter, and she found it hard to understand the reasonableness of running along with one’s nose to the ground. Eventually, as she got older, she discovered that when Andy started baying and carrying on, it meant that a rabbit was about, and that if she just sat quietly in a central place a rabbit might run right in front of her, and that if she were quick, she might—sometimes—catch one. The rabbit population is not in much more danger from her than it is from Andy, but the two dogs spend hours hunting, each in his own way.

  Today I discovered that Black Edith, the new cat, is wilier and even more of an opportunist than Tazzie, and may become the most effective hunter of all. I got Black Edith last spring from a farmer who, upending the two black kittens in the litter, handed me what he said was the female. I had named a previous black cat, a male, Sacheverell, so it seemed only proper to name this one Edith. Soon, however, I noticed that Edith was growing testicles. Any sexually mature male cat I have ever had has always wandered off, and I did not want to lose this one because he has such a fine personality. After spending the night outdoors doing whatever it is cats do out there, he greets me with a pleased-sounding per-r-r-r-k each morning, wrapping himself around my ankles in an ecstasy of affection while I make the coffee. When I sit down to drink it, he jumps on my lap, purring and enjoying the morning coffee ritual in his own way as much as I do. In addition, he is intrepid. The dogs would like to chase him, but when they try he rolls over on his back and swipes at their noses and they back off, acting confused. It is true that Tazzie regards Black Edith as a living bone. I often find her gnawing on him, holding him between her paws, but he regards this as a pleasant display of attention, and when her teeth become too serious, he yowls and rakes her tender nose with a full set of claws until she lets go.

  I wanted to keep Edith, so I took him to the animal clinic to be neutered. As the vet’s wife was making out his admission card she suggested that I should rename him Eddie. No, Edith it is, I insisted, and Edith it shall stay. However, he has grown up to be an emphatic cat, and it has become more fitting and proper to call him Black Edith.

  This morning I was sitting in the brown leather chair listening to the news on the radio, dimly aware of Andy baying somewhere in the distance as he pursued the elusive rabbit. Through the three big windows I could see Tazzie sitting calmly on a strategic high spot in the field. My attention, however, was on the news until I saw a black shape bounding toward the barn. It was Black Edith, carrying something nearly as big as himself in his jaws. It was the rabbit. Pausing momentarily to study the twelve-foot post connecting the deck to the barn loft, he leaped to the deck, touching the post at one point only. Although by now staggering, he again leaped, sideways this time, out over space into an as yet unfilled window hole in the new storage loft. He was correct to move quickly, for Tazzie had spotted him and came running. She hurled herself up the loft stairs, but of course was not agile enough to leap through the window opening. Frustrated, she scratched the loft door and whined. Some time went by before Andy, nose to the ground, picking up scent now of both rabbit and cat, arrived. He sniffed at the post Black Edith had bounded from in his leap, looked up, understood what had happened and joined Tazzie on the deck. Both dogs could hear activity inside the loft and glared at the door, outraged that they had been done out of their rabbit by a mere cat.

  By this time I had come out, and could hear noises inside the loft that suggested Black Edith, young and inexpert as he is, had not killed the rabbit but was chasing it around the loft, upsetting things as he did so. I put both dogs in the cabin and opened the loft door. Black Edith greeted me with an exasperated meeowwww, hoping, perhaps, to ally me with his cause. The rabbit was hopping about unharmed. I scooped up the cat and took him to the cabin, then returned to the loft to look for the rabbit. I soon found him in a corner behind some boxes, frozen with panic terror. I picked him up and discovered that despite his wildly beating heart he had only the slightest of skin wounds, and would be able to survive in the wild. I walked a quarter of a mile behind the barn, out of sight of the dogs and cat who were watching me intently through the cabin windows. While I walked I stroked the rabbit and felt his heartbeat quiet. He was a young rabbit, also inexperienced, and perhaps he learned something useful this morning. Back in the woods I found a thicket of fallen tree branches and briars, and set him down there. He looked at me for rather a long time and then hopped away deeper into the woods.

  Today is my wedding anniversary. I am sad when I think of Paul and
remember what expectations we had the day we were married. But those failed expectations are what made me a beekeeper in the Ozarks. I like that a lot, and none of it would have happened without Paul.

  My grandfather was a beekeeper in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I grew up, but everyone’s grandfather was a beekeeper, so that doesn’t signify. Besides, my grandfather frightened me. He terrified everyone within shouting distance and I tried to stay out of his way so I picked up no love of beekeeping from him.

  He was a stern man who always wore three heavy layers of clothing, starting, it was reported, with a woolen union suit. He claimed that all the layers kept heat out during the summer and in during the winter.

  Grandpa liked to winter his bees in the basement, and in the autumn he would imperiously order my father to carry them down there single-handed, despite the danger of hernia. Grandpa couldn’t help because he was subject to terrible, racking pains caused, the doctor tried to tell him, by the binding of the union suit.

  When Paul and I first started keeping bees and reading about beekeeping, I discovered that overwintering bees indoors is an old-fashioned practice now discredited. So much for the grandfatherly example.

  My grandmother was a timid, sad-faced woman, worn down with the cares of living with such a man, and trying to manage on the tiny household allowance he doled out to her. She never complained and seemed almost saintly. She outlived him by many years, and after his death regained a measure of spirit. Toward the end of her life, she gathered her grandchildren around her.

  “I want you to remember your grandfather always,” she said.

  We nodded solemnly. She beckoned us closer. “I want you to remember that he was a mean, dirty, stingy old man,” she said in a firm voice, and then looked off into the distance, a pleased smile playing over her face.

  My other grandmother, Annie, was quite a different grandma, but she didn’t have anything to do with bees either. What she had to do with was Success and Men.

  She was a correct and regal woman despite the fact that she walked with a slight limp. She had injured her knee from a fall during a bicycle race. Everyone said she had been a demon cycler in her younger days. Back then, in the 1880s, she had borrowed money from a Man banker at 3 percent interest to go to college. After graduating she taught school, paid back her loan, raced bicycles and, clawing her way past Man players, became a state tennis champion. She was competitive and adored sports. I can remember her hunched over the radio, muttering at the Chicago Cubs, who were a constant source of disappointment. “Just like a bunch of Men,” she would say.

  She would have sniffed at today’s debate over the Equal Rights Amendment, for she believed that she and all her sex were superior to Men, and that mere equality would be a step down for any woman. In fact she would have sided with the anti-ERA forces, if only because of the unisex bathroom issue. I can remember going on Sunday afternoon drives with her and stopping at gas stations with only one restroom. She would go in to use it, but would stalk back, tall, straight, her eyes blazing. “Man pee!!!” she would announce loudly, and not even the greatest need could force her to use that single-sex facility.

  Grandma Annie had been married briefly and irrelevantly; her two daughters were the product of immaculate conception. There were only two men who won her approval. “Yes,” she would sigh, “we’ve all been persecuted: Douglas MacArthur, Jesus Christ and me.”

  I never found out exactly how it was that she had been persecuted, but persecution, she said darkly, accounted for her own lack of Success in Life. It had escaped her, but she was determined it should not escape her grandchildren. None of us showed signs of athletic ability and would never be scouted by the Cubs, so it was hard to know what she wanted for us. We thought about it a lot. Occasionally, instead of saying that someone was a Success, she would speak of him as a Big Person. I knew that she had her heart set on my brother Bil growing to be six feet tall, so I thought that just growing very large might be satisfactory. Once I took our family dog, a brainless sway-backed Great Dane whom Grandma Annie hated, to a pet show, and the dog, for all her faults, was awarded a beautiful blue silk ribbon with gold lettering for the pet with the longest tail. I showed it to Grandma Annie, and ever afterwards she spoke well of the dog. I got the impression that if any of her grandchildren had grown very big and been able to grow tails of suitable length, she would have been proud.

  As I grew older, however, I learned that Success meant more than physical stature. We grandchildren were to win foundation grants, a Nobel prize each, and the fourth-grade class presidency. I think she had in mind universal acclaim, esteem, admiration and a certificate suitable for framing.

  When I turned three years old, Grandma Annie decided that I should become a concert pianist. My father bought a piano and my mother found a teacher for me, a Roman Catholic nun named Sister Esther who taught music at a convent school. Our family wasn’t Catholic, and I had never seen a nun before. I was able to take in stride her long black habit, her cross on a chain and her rosary beads, but I could not help staring at the stiffly starched white collar that covered her neck and encircled her face. It made creases in her cheeks and forehead that I could see when she turned her head. I felt sorry for her and tried to be good.

  Sister Esther was a severe, tense woman. She showed me a naked white china doll in a toy crib and a pile of straw nearby. The doll, she told me, was the baby Jesus, and he was cold. If I practiced hard and had a successful lesson, I would be allowed to put one straw in the baby Jesus’ crib to help keep him warm. But if I was not successful, I couldn’t put a straw in the crib, the baby Jesus would get a chill, and it would all be my fault!

  I was appalled.

  Like many children, I had been born with perfect pitch. Aided by that biological accident, driven by trying to be nice to an oddly dressed woman with creases in her face who knew what Success was, but most particularly horrified that the baby Jesus might catch cold on my account, I quickly learned the scales on the piano. Three lessons went by, and I was able to give the baby Jesus a straw each time.

  Sister Esther told my mother that I was a child prodigy. Sister Esther was pleased, for I was her first prodigy. She even smiled a little. Grandma Annie said it was only natural that her grandchild should be a prodigy.

  I was terrified. I was sure that those scales had been my limit, and I was right. I was only three and a half years old and, musically speaking, I had peaked. As the lessons went on, Sister Esther grew stranger and more agitated. I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me about harmony. The baby Jesus never again got a straw. My fingers stumbled when I tried to play exercises. Sister Esther fingered her rosary. I embarrassed her by forgetting my memorized piece at recital time. The baby Jesus suffered, she told me. I was miserable.

  The years went by and I was still playing the piano at the level of a precocious three-year-old when Sister Esther had a nervous breakdown. Just before she did so, however, she tensely admitted that she might have made a mistake about me, and that actually I was rather retarded musically.

  Grandma Annie recovered quickly. She said, “Well, maybe the child can dance. She has a very long neck.” She was always saying that kind of thing. I couldn’t understand what the length of my neck had to do with dancing. I felt like a giraffe, and tried to pull my pigtails around my neck so that people wouldn’t notice.

  Mother found a blowsy retired dancer who taught ballet in her own home and enrolled me as her pupil. Since I was an awkward, gangly child, the ballet teacher sized me up right away. She set me some simple exercises, sat down in a comfortable chair with a flowered slipcover and sought relief from watching me by taking a nip now and then from a dainty flask she kept tucked in the bosom of her leotard. The nips gradually became more frequent over the months until, at last, she told my mother I was hopeless. She took down her ballet-teaching sign and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

  I was very sorry that I was already eight years old and had caused so much pain to the adults, ha
d added my share of persecution to the baby Jesus and was not a Success (although I was grateful I had not harmed Douglas MacArthur). Deep down inside I knew that I was never going to be a Success because of something I had learned in school: all the Successful people were dead. They had taught us about George Washington. He was wise, calm, patriotic and truthful. He was a Success. He was dead. They taught us about Alexander the Great. He found a knot that couldn’t be untied (the kind that you get in shoelaces sometimes, I surmised), and he cut it in two. Children were not allowed to cut the knots in their shoelaces, but when Alexander did so it showed that he was an innovative thinker. He was a Success. He was dead.

  They taught us about Robert-the-Bruce. He wanted very much to be king, but failed a number of times. Once he failed so badly that he was caught and put in a dark dungeon. While he was in the dungeon, he used his time by watching a spider spinning a web in a corner. Over and over again the spider tried to attach her web where she wanted it but kept failing, until at last, with a huge effort, she managed to get it just right. This encouraged Robert-the-Bruce so much that he went on trying to be king while he was still in prison, and after he got out too. Teachers in every grade told us the story, and always ended (it must have been in the curriculum guide) by looking at us and saying, “So remember, children, if at first you don’t succeed, TRY, TRY AGAIN.”

  Out of the teachers’ hearing, some of my irreverent classmates used to laugh about Robert-the-Bruce and chant, “If at first you don’t succeed, FRY, FRY A HEN.” I never said fry, fry a hen. In fact, since I had been a failure twice before I was nine years old, I was interested in Robert-the-Bruce and thought about him a lot. But I decided I could never be like him. I was afraid of spiders, and if I were to be locked up in a dungeon with one, I wouldn’t be inspired, I would cry. However, Robert-the-Bruce was surely a Success. He was dead.